Old. Conservative. Christian. In love with my wife, our boys, Texas, America, Western Civilization, and Jesus. Sorry about the decline of newspapers.

August 2, 2017

AUGUST 2, 2017 / A Brit mystery writer on . . .

. . . a particular modern regret:

She never spoke of regrets she felt that she had not married and had a family and that she had probably now reached an age where that was no longer likely to happen. She never let on that she had ever wanted a child. Nobody who knew her would ever have suspected that Karen Meadows was anything other than a happy, successful, fulfilled woman.

This is by mystery writer Hilary Bonner, When the Dead Cry Out (Leisure Books 2006). She is introducing a detective with a cold case about a woman and two children who disappeared twenty-seven years earlier.

The fictional Karen Meadows's regrets (and self-doubts) are, of course, not peculiarly modern but are particularly modern. Our culture devalues marriage and provides no useful substitute -- there being none -- for a family. In her case that would be a husband and children.